We have a barrel of fees

So why, when he's dumped other promises, and is imposing fees that sure feel like taxes, is he keeping to his pledge not to raise taxes, particularly on those who have prospered so in California?

As the Los Angeles Times' Steve Lopez pointed out in his Jan. 11 column (where he also advanced a draconian idea suggested in this column months ago that the governor bail the state out by selling naming rights to beaches and forests), 95 of the nation's 400 billionaires are in California, with a net worth of nearly $103 billion. Judging by the cars I drive next to, we're similarly laden with millionaires. For all the bitching I hear about how tough California is on business, lots of people get rich here. Shouldn't they be willing to bear a little more of the state's burden than the schlub who's just scraping by? If I had more food on my plate than I could possibly eat, and you had a survival biscuit, shouldn't I be expected to more give more than you to those who have nothing?

I'll leave that for the ethicists to figure out. What I'm more worried about is, do I just have dicks on the brain, or did anyone else think the graph Schwarzenegger kept stroking in his budget speech looked like a big Picasso-drawn cock? Sure, it's a graph, but it was a jutting, jaunty purplish-pink kind of graph (the serrated cross-section line marked $63.8 would be the foreskin, I suppose). Please tell me I don't have dicks on the brain. Someone?

I expect to be talking about anger more in the weeks ahead, since the minute-media take on Howard Dean is that he's "too angry" to get elected. Schwarzenegger rode into office on almost nothing but anger. He had no experience, no budget, no articulate program, no argument he was willing to test against the other candidates. He was mad as hell and he dropped wrecking balls on cars. Democrats won't do that for you. Usually, nothing short of a Warner Bros. cartoon character will do that for you. But Arnold had his car-crushing Kristalnacht, and the angry electorate voted for him.

We'll probably have further cause at the state level to ponder the pitfalls of voting angry. But nationally, I'd say any Democrat who wants my vote had damn well better be angry. Distinguish it as righteous anger, perhaps, but if a candidate can look at the lies, misdeeds and injustices radiating out of the Bush White House and not work up a head of steam over it, he or she should get the hell out of the way. These are times deserving of our anger, friend.